Ryan Stayton

Expectations: what are they good for? Absolutely nothing? Arguably.

Maybe you have high expectations. You expect to reach your team’s ceiling because you bleed and can’t consider anything short of their best case, which means your best case is the realization of said ceiling, a ceiling that mehs your satisfaction since you expected it.

Maybe you have modest expectations. You don’t want to get too vested in this team, because you’re getting older, settling down and accept that sitting down to watch two basketball games a week is no longer in play. Your modest expectations reflect your modest fanaticism, so your ceiling is a pleasant surprise that causes you to pump your fist twice, buy a “Round of 32” t for your kid and resume your life.

Low expectations mean either the state of the program or your relationship with it has fractured. Your ceiling is reconciliation.

Worse than all three: no expectations. You can’t care not because you don’t, but because it hurts. Again and again and again until you no longer reach for the Maize and Blue Deli Ham-I-Am sandwich because you know it’s hooked up to electrodes.

After a decade of disappointment, this is where Michigan basketball has me after proving again and again and again that the only thing worth expecting was disappointment, a malaise that dates back to Steve Fisher’s swansong (’96-’97, not coincidentally my frosh year).

Consider this an effort to purge the program’s demons (of which there are enough to out-horror the Saw and Leprechaun franchises combined, thus skip these 12 years coma-style if you’re the kind of person who wouldn’t go back in time to book a trip on the Titanic or Hindenburg):

’96-’97: Traylor shatters a backboard (the replacement money for which was taken from the Michigan Practice Facility Fund) en route to that über-talented team winning its first eight games, including wins against top five Duke and Arizona, ballooning them to a #3 ranking. The Rainbow Classic in Hawaii has Pearl Harbor-ish effects and foreordains that same team losing six of its last seven, winning the NIT (aka “ASS” Tourney) which plays out much like the 1992 Dream Team’s gold medal run.

’97-’98: Ed Martin’s (henceforth referred to as Satan) outed (and, in one of the lone program highlights of the decade, dies during the investigation, plunging him into a hell so deep that he’ll spend eternity watching Michigan’s games versus Duke and Sparty from the early naughts with commentary from Thomas Amaker, who will henceforth be referred to as Turtleneck Abomination), Fisher’s out, and AD Goss promotes inexperienced Ellerbe over Fisher’s Xs and Os go-to Brian Dutcher to coach another talented team who cash in all the program’s chips before the whole cheating thing cripples it, beating #1 Duke and winning the first ever Big Ten Tournament (Mormon from downtown!) only to squander its dancing three seed by losing in the second round to UCLA (blerg Baron Davis blerg!), heartbreaking at the time and devastating in hindsight. Michigan’s next ten years are as dance-less as the middle school experience of that quadriplegic exchange student who only spoke Finnish. I think his name was Glåfnol.

’98-’99: The least talented Michigan basketball team since pre-Fab Five goes a predictable 12-19. Louis Bullock eschews overseas pro ball in favor of playing Fredo Corleone in an Off-Broadway adaptation of The Godfather II.

’99-’00: Freshman Jamal Crawford, certainly the best pro (and thus arguably the best player) in blue since Christopher Webber, joins a highly touted class including had-to-have-him Ann Arbor native and McD’er Lavell Blanchard, but plays just 17 games before an unjustifiably harsh suspension courtesy of the NCAA (henceforth referred to as “DICK”) destroys the team and his collegiate future as he bows to the NBA. Hello, ASS!

’00-’01: Ellerbe walks into an advertising agency and drives a John Deere riding mower over the foot that is Michigan basketball. The only things the team wins in its last ten games are a home game versus Iowa and the Nobel Prize for Suck.

’01-’02: Mrs. Pitino, a woman of loose morals and a hayseed’s geographic allegiances, defecates on the Diag when her husband chooses Michigan over Louisville by asking him, “Slick Rick, would you rather live in Ann Arbor or Louisville?” the morning of his press conference. Instead of asking, “Is Louisville still in Kentucky?” he concedes. John Kerry was watching. Trendy hire Turtleneck Abomination wins ten games. The team played 28. You do the math.

’02-’03: A decent recruiting class led by Daniel Horton and Lester Abram never stood a chance at dancing, but only because self-imposed sanctions nix all tourney hopes. Thanks, Satan. The team flirts with the conference title, but falters at home vs I-L-L. Turtleneck Abomination earns high expectations that he spends the next four years strangling, earning that time the nickname “The Ron Powlus Era.”

’03-’04: ASS champs! T-shirts still for sale at Ulrich’s. So weird that the team hasn’t improved.

’04-’05: Horton and Abram play 16 games total between them. When it rains it bludgeons your team with injuries, sanctions, defections and suck. Just one more year of, “Next year, right?” Right???

’05-’06: Wrong. Needing only a win in the Big Ten Tourney against a high-school-JV bad Minnesota team, the team’s turtlenecks are exposed. ASS runner-ups! So weird that the team still hasn’t improved.

’06-’07: It’s impossible to have any expectations when the future is more predictable than the end of Teen Wolf, Too. Not at all weird that the team still hasn’t improved. Turtlenecks heart ASS! Curb sale! All turtlenecks half off!

’07-’08: Welcome—err, damn, Beezer! You lost to the Turtleneck Abomination’s scholarship-less Harvard squadron and racked up more losses (22) than any team in Michigan history? Ellerbe could’ve done that.

Further consider:

’96-’08 Players Dismissed: Maurice Searight, Brandun Hughes, Albert White, Dominic Ingerson, Avery Queen and Kevin Gaines

’96-’08 Player Defec(a)tions: Willie Mitchell, Leland Anderson, Josh Moore, Jamal Crawford, Ekpe Udoh, Kelvin Grady and four scholarships lost to sanctions from ’04-‘08

Little known fact: all those players currently make up the entire roster of the NBA D-League’s Fort Wayne Mad Ants.

And then this:

’08-’09:

Even last year my friends and I (minus one admirable optimist) flouted expectations, insisting until early March that this was a year of nice improvement; maybe (surely!) next year’s the year. It was the year that would show us how unbelievably hard it is to be ranked, or even to just dance even after beating Duke and UCLA. Satan made it look so easy.

And then this:

’09-’10: There are few things as exciting but terrifying as considering the future and all its potential, yet before us stands the most promising group of young men to don the maize and blue in a long time. They’re ranked 15^th without having made a shot (their preseason ranking being M’s first since at least 1997 by my count), and though optimism knows no comfort like the support of (approximately) non-partisan third parties, I’m inevitably reminded of a pro-smoking ad in an old Simpsons episode that said, “Fifty million smokers can’t be wrong.”

So dare we risk disappointment, when yet again all signs point to respectability? Dare we forget that last year’s team was literally one game from another ASS tourney? Take out the Savannah State comeback or the IU comeback or the Duke, UCLA Purdue or Minnesota wins and it’s all ASS all the way. This is, after all, a program who for twenty years hasn’t won without Satan.

Expectations reflect an emotional investment. They mean you care, and in sports you can’t have fun if you don’t care. By last year, blahblahblah clichéclichécliché I’d forgotten how to have fun, but holy hell was it fun last February to roll into a bar at 9 AM on the left coast to watch M play at Minnesota and do something they hadn’t made me do since the ‘90s: hug strangers.

Just like you can’t win if you don’t play, you can’t have fun if you don’t hope. It’s largely because of the lows that the highs feel so good, and given our lows the horizon now appears dotted with Empire State Buildings standing tall atop Mount Everests. We’ve been scared to expect anything from this team since the 20^th century, but now they’re a must, they’re justified, they’re finally fun and they’re the reason it finally feels like Michigan basketball is back.

And if we don’t get them this year, I’ll no doubt say we’ll get them next year, and dammit if I won’t mean it.